Satire

On 26 February, Spitting Image will
celebrate its 30 birthday. BBC Four will mark the occasion with a
special episode of Arena which promises to tell the “vexed and
frequently hilarious story” of the sketch show which ran for 21 series between
1984 and 1996 and marked a high point in British satire.

The Government gave us all food for thought last week when it finally published the first data from its long-awaited report on happiness. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) interviewed 80,000 people for its National Well-being Programme, and now it can tell us with some certainty that, on a happiness scale from 0 to 10, people in the UK are, on average, 7.6 happy.

And the first big winner at this weekend’s Academy Awards is... Sacha Baron Cohen. The British comedian won’t be getting within a country mile of a golden statuette, of course, but that hasn’t prevented him from already managing to successfully hijack Sunday’s event for PR purposes.

The scintillating actor Ben Daniels is back on stage, with Sophie Okonedo (from The Slap), in an eagerly awaited premiere by Joe Penhall. This is the first play in four years from the author of Some Voices and Blue/Orange: portraits of mental illness that rang painfully true. Alas, though, Haunted Child, directed by Jeremy Herrin, proves peculiarly unconvincing.

Like an episode of Mad Men, Louise Levene's winning debut novel brings back to startling life the social fabric and fashion fetishes of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jane is a war orphan living with her slovenly aunty "Reen" in suburban Norbury.